The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the potential of simulating the profiles of the mean velocity and turbulence intensities for the steep open channel flows over a smooth boundary using artificial neural networks. In a laboratory flume, turbulent flow conditions were measured using a fibre-optic laser doppler velocimeter (FLDV). One thousand and sixty-four data sets were collected for different slopes and aspect ratios at different locations. These data sets were randomly split into two subsets, i.e. training and validation sets. The multi-layer functional link network (MFLN) was used to construct the simulation model based on the training data. The constructed MFLN models can almost perfectly simulate the velocity profile and turbulence intensity. The values of correlation coefficient (gamma) are close to one and the values of root mean square error (RMSE) are close to zero in all conditions. The results demonstrate that the MFLN can precisely simulate the velocity profiles, while the log law and Reynolds stress model (RSM) are less effective when used to simulate the velocity profiles close to the side wall. The simulated longitudinal turbulence intensities yielded by the MFLN were also fairly consistent with the measured data, while the simulated vertical turbulence intensities by the RSM were not consistent with the measured data. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.